Red Hat held its second annual Red Hat Summit in Nashville this week. At the event, vnunet.com sat down with the company's chief executive, Matthew Szulik, to talk about the firm's latest initiatives and future directions.

This interview with Matthew Szulik is available as an audio podcast on the Silicon Valley Sleuth blog. 

Red Hat will contribute certification and testing tools to Fedora. Is this signalling an increased development focus within Red Hat?

I wouldn't say increased. I think it's responding to a continued set of needs that we've been hearing from customers and the open source community. Today you saw Red Hat responding to that. With the support of the Fedora board, we'll bring that to market as quickly as we can.

But if you look back at last year's Red Hat Summit, there was a lot of talk about middleware. Now it seems to be more of a developer focus.

There's the combination of the growing success of Fedora with the pending Jboss acquisition, and the opportunity for Red Hat to have the infrastructure and the tools to create a successful developer relationship. Those capabilities are lining up.

In what way?

They are real, there are not slideware. We've talked about the Dogtail project specifically. (You have to love the names that come out of the open source community.)

Dogtail is a project that was developed internally at Red Hat that's all around building a test harness for the certification and testing for software and hardware integration decks. This allows engineers and developers to run tests against a pre-configured set of solutions that they want to build, and look for optimisation, regression testing, etc.

It's our hope that the Fedora board will approve that and that it will find its way into the open source community. In anticipation of the Jboss acquisition closing, these will provide real tools and real technologies for developers to use in an open source model.

Is Red Hat looking to compete with companies like Mercury Interactive?

I think those companies do a good job of what they do and are focusing on. Their business models are very different from ours. We want to focus on that core of open source developers who are looking for a different set of technologies and solutions to build certification and testing around an open source model.